Arguably one of the greatest lessons that we can learn from the 2016 Presidential Election is that our media can be very easily manipulated. All that Donald Trump needed to do was be loud and outlandish, and our television, print, and social media raced to catch every word that came out of his mouth. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump received hours of free media coverage, which helps to explain why he won the election despite the fact that he spent only half as much as Clinton did. According to CNBC, Trump spent $238.9 million, while Clinton spent $450.6 million.
“Chicago,” the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, does a wonderful job of depicting such flawless manipulation of our unskeptical media. Billy Flynn, a cut-throat lawyer who represents everything that people find offensive about lawyers, sings the two particular songs in the musical that show this idea most clearly. The first is “We both Reached for the Gun,” during which Flynn convinces every Chicago journalist (and thus, every Chicago resident) that Roxie Hart, who murdered her illicit lover because he broke up with her, killed the man in self-defense. He convinces everyone that both she and the man she killed were reaching for the gun, and that she was fortunate to get away with her life. Flynn constantly uses evasive techniques to confuse the journalists around him.
The 2002 film adaptation of the musical makes several visual choices that really drive home the essence of the song. In the film, Billy Flynn is portrayed as a ventriloquist, who controls Roxy and all of the journalists in the city. He tells the same lie over and over, and eventually all of the journalists, with their loud and far-reaching voices, eventually begin to repeat the lie verbatim. In fact, at the end of the musical number, Flynn performs a cliche ventriloquist trick. One of the journalists hands him a glass of milk, Flynn drinks it. Yet, even while he is drinking, his voice continues to ring throughout the city. The newspapers are telling the lie for him, even after he has stopped singing.
This song perfectly displays Donald Trump’s behavior during (and even before) the Presidential campaign. He told the same lies again and again, and our media, even louder farther-reaching than the media in “Chicago,” repeated it so that it reached virtually the entire world. Trump told the world that President Obama’s birth certificate was fake, and he received so much media attention for it that he created the Birther Movement. He claimed that all Mexicans were rapists and murderers; that all Muslims were terrorists; that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama founded ISIS, and again he received so much media attention for his outlandish statements that he was able to win the election without spending much money on advertisements. He could rely on our media to advertise for him.
The other song that applies to Donald Trump’s media presence during and after the 2016 Presidential Election is “Razzle Dazzle,” during which Billy Flynn describes exactly how he takes advantage of the media. He postulates that he is so good at feeding the journalists, and therefore the people, dazzling statements, that they are never able to look underneath his fables. Flynn sings, “What if your hinges all are rusting?/ What if, in fact, you're just disgusting?/ Razzle dazzle 'em/ And they’ll never catch wise!”
Like Flynn, Trump is phenomenal at turning the public’s eyes away from his true disgusting nature. He was able to make appalling statements about minorities and women, yet still win the election by pointing the finger at Hillary Clinton’s emails. When the public demanded his tax returns, he again pointed the finger at Clinton and her emails.
Even after the election, he continues to behave this way. When the media, which has improved drastically since the election, began turning up the heat on the myriad scandals in Trump’s infant cabinet, Trump tweeted, with no evidence, that President Obama ordered wiretapping of Trump Tower during the election. We know that Trump made that up to divert attention. And divert attention, it did. Now journalists, both partisan and nonpartisan, are reporting on his wire-tapping allegations; the FBI and members of Congress are investigating the issue; and we have all-but stopped talking about Trump’s ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. As Billy Flynn states in “Razzle Dazzle,” “How can they see with sequins in their eyes?”
Clearly, Donald Trump learned a lesson or two from Billy Flynn. Both the fictional character and the real-life character are singularly talented at manipulating the media, and it is about time that we learn not to me taken advantage of in this way.
